I finally got around to reading the piece (in The New Yorker ) about football culture among fanatical supporters of Beşiktas, one of the three big three clubs in Istanbul, Turkey, by the writer Elif Batuman. Unfortunately you need to pay to read the piece. But here is a short excerpt:

Deniz has attended all but two of Beşiktaş’s games, home and away, for the past seven years. He often thinks with regret of those two missed games. He characterized Beşiktaş as the team of the unexpected, the team of underdogs, and talked about Çarşı’s slogans, which are unveiled on giant banners during matches. ‘We Are All Black,’ proclaimed one banner, after rival fans had made reference to the race of the French-Senegalese Beşiktaş star Pascal Nouma [who played for Beşiktaş between 2000 and 2001] . When Fenerbahçe disparaged a Beşiktaş manager whose father had been a janitor, there were banners saying ‘We Are All Janitors.’ And when an international committee of astronomers removed Pluto from the list of planets Çarşı took up the cause: ‘We Are All Pluto.’

If you wondered, the other two big Turkish clubs are Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe.

* You can also hear Batuman talk about football in Istanbul here.